Ex Microsoft Ad Star Joanne Bradford To Yahoo

Joanne Bradford, former chief media officer for MSN, who joined startup Spot Runner in March, is leaving for Yahoo. Perhaps it was for the job title: Yahoo is appointing her "SVP, U.S. Revenue and Market Development," a newly created position, reporting to Hilary Schneider, EVP of Yahoo U.S. On its face, that's a nice hire for Yahoo...and a big loss for Spot Runner and Microsoft.

Perhaps things aren't going as great at Spot Runner as they'd have us believe. The company brought in Bradford as a high-profile hire five months ago. Just last month, amid a "course correction" and 50 job cuts, the company told us Bradford's national sales force would be staffed up with 40 to 50 new employees.

Having just raised $51 million, Spot Runner doesn't have money problems. So why would Bradford leave a promising startup promising to reinvent TV advertising to go to a struggling Internet behemoth whose future -- and ownership -- is so uncertain?

(Well, maybe because running the US sales organization for the second-biggest Internet company on the planet is a hell of an opportunity).